If you haven’t yet seen Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237, it can be difficult to understand just how numerous and intricate are the conspiracy theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. (You should see it regardless: It’s a great movie!) There are all sorts of incredibly detailed arguments, from why people believe it’s Kubrick’s admission that he faked the moon landings to a deep structural theory that the film is actually 2001 in reverse. To these many theories, we can now add blogger Mary Katharine Ham’s contribution: that Kubrick was predicting the highest-grossing animated film of all time 33 years in advance.
Ham backs up her sneaking suspicion that Frozen and The Shining are the same movie with a plethora of side-by-side screenshots and suppositions. Some of them are fairly spot-on, and some of them are a stretch, to say the least; but all of them make for a highly entertaining read. Sure, you may have noticed the architectural resemblance of the respective settings of Arendelle and The Overlook Hotel:
But have you noticed the character similarities between Elsa and Jack Torrance? Volatile main characters who slowly lose their human connection to their families after a protracted stay inside a desolate icy building?
And don’t even get Ham started on the ways that Anna is basically Danny: “An innocent protagonist, touched by the supernatural, is locked out of a forbidden room inside a giant, ornate, high-ceilinged building in a cold, desolate landscape, and forced to play childlike games alone in its incongruously cavernous hallways.”
Ham has more—much, much more—to her theory, which you can see in full on her site. Suffice it to say, it will be hard to ever watch Elsa sing “Let It Go” while building her ice castle ever again, without harboring the sneaking doubt that maybe, just maybe, her true desire at that moment is to bash some brains right the fuck in.
(Via Buzzfeed)